Yesterday I was talking with my music teacher about the Rast Nakış of Abdülkadir Merâgî — or, as his name is also written, ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī. He lived approximately from 1360 to 1435. Somewhere in that long life he must have composed this piece.
And suddenly one is faced with a simple but rather dizzying question: how does a piece of music from the fourteenth or fifteenth century arrive in our own time?
Did it come down to us through oral transmission? From master to pupil, from ear to ear, from hand to hand? Or was there already some form of musical notation in those days, by which such a composition could be written down?
We are, of course, used to thinking of notation in terms of a staff. But that was not Merâgî’s world. In his musical environment, music was learned mainly by listening, imitating, remembering and repeating. Yet that does not mean that nothing was written down. There were indeed forms of musical notation and ordering, but they looked quite different: letters, numbers, names of tones, references to maqāms, rhythmic cycles and circular diagrams.
Not really a score from which a modern musician could simply play, but rather a reminder, a theoretical scheme, an attempt to catch living music in signs.
As we were speaking about this, I suddenly remembered a few photographs of a manuscript in Ottoman Turkish that I had once received from Marten. I seemed to remember that they had something to do with Merâgî, though I was no longer sure.
Later I found those photographs again. On one page there were several circles, exactly of the kind that belongs to the old edvâr tradition: musical knowledge arranged in circles, as if tones and relationships do not merely stand on a line, but move in a circle. On another page there were schematic drawings of two instruments: the ʿūd and the çeng, a kind of harp.
It was the çeng that touched me. Not at first because I knew exactly what it meant, but because the image stayed with me. And quite by chance — or perhaps that word is too weak here — I then discovered that the çeng also appears in Rūmī’s story of the old harp player.
Then two worlds suddenly began to overlap.
On the one hand, the world of Merâgî: musical theory, maqāms, circles, diagrams, instruments, order.
On the other hand, the world of Rūmī: the story, the old human being, poverty, and the question of what remains when everything we have relied on falls away.
For that story is not only about an old musician. Nor is it only about beauty or music. Behind it lies the question: what do we rely on in this world? Where do we find our dignity? Our security? Our consolation? And what are the veils that come between us and the Divine?
The old harp player has relied all his life on his art. His instrument, his skill, his audience, perhaps also the appreciation of others. All these things have carried him. But when he grows old and no one listens anymore, they fall away. Then it becomes clear that even something noble like music can become a veil, when one clings to it as if it were the ground of one’s being.
In this way the çeng becomes ambiguous. It is an instrument of beauty, but also of attachment. It opens something, but it can also conceal something. It allows something to be heard, but it can also stand between the human being and the Divine. Only when the old harp player has nothing left to claim as his own does his playing become prayer. No longer a performance for people, but surrender.
And so a conversation about a composition by Merâgî suddenly became, for me, a much larger story. About how music travels through time. About what is written down and what can only be passed on alive. About schemes and circles, but also about breath, hand, memory and loss.
Perhaps the Rast Nakış has reached us in this way as well: not through one straight line, but through many threads. Written down perhaps, certainly sung, learned, changed, forgotten, taken up again.
And somewhere among those threads the çeng appears: first as a schematic drawing in an Ottoman-Turkish manuscript, then as the harp in a story by Rūmī.
As if an instrument from an old musical treatise suddenly begins to speak. Not only about music, but also about ourselves. About what we rely on. And about what may only become audible when everything else falls away.